The Internet is a wide area network that connects hundreds of thousands of computers and smaller sub-networks world-wide. Businesses, government bodies and entities, educational organizations, and individuals publish information or data organized in the form of websites. A website may comprise multiple web pages that display a specific set of information and may contain links to other web pages with related or additional information. Some web pages include multiple web pages that are displayed together in a single user interface window. Each web page is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that includes the location or Web address of the computer that contains the resource to be accessed in addition to the location of the resource on that computer.
An Internet or Web address, generally is composed of four parts: a protocol name, the location of a web server that provides the website information, a name identifying the organization or individual that maintains the web server, and a suffix that identifies the type of organization. For example, “.com” identifies a commercial organization, “.edu” identifies an educational institution, and “.gov” identifies a government organization. The protocol name specifies the protocol that defines the set of rules and standards to be applied when exchanging information between the web server that communicates the website information and a client computer that receives and displays the website information. The URL includes the Internet address and the resource location on the web server. The resource defines the web page presentation.
Streaming refers to the ability to play media streams such as audio and video streams in a continuous way while those streams are being transmitted to the client computer over a network such as the Internet. Applications, that can be built on top of streaming services, can be classified into live information delivery and on-demand applications. Live information delivery applications include the live delivery of radio and television programs. On-demand information delivery applications include music, news-on-demand, and sports-on-demand applications. Conversely, the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), e-mail, and the Short Messaging Service (SMS), for example, transmit messages to and from devices in a store-and-forward manner and allow the transmission of a combination of text, sounds, images, and video.
The Packet-switched Streaming Service (PSS) provides a framework for Internet Protocol (IP) based streaming applications over networks. IP is a communications protocol that supports the creation of large, geographically-diverse networks of computers using a variety of physical communication linkage technologies. An IP address is the numerical address that defines a location of a computer on the Internet. Using the Domain Name System (DNS), the numerical IP address maps to the location of the web server contained in the URL. Computers on the Internet use IP addresses to route traffic and to establish connections among themselves.
The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an industry standard streaming multimedia application layer protocol. RTSP provides an extensible framework to enable controlled, on-demand delivery of real-time data, such as audio and video data. Sources of data can include both live data feeds and stored clips (on-demand). The protocol is intended to control multiple data delivery sessions, to provide a means for choosing delivery channels such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP), multicast UDP, and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and to provide a means for choosing delivery mechanisms based upon the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP).
UDP is a transport layer protocol used in the Internet that does not establish a connection or provide reliable data transfer. Multicast UDP supports one to many message transmission using UDP. In multicast UDP, a computer must join the multicast group to send and/or to receive data for the multicast group. In contrast, TCP is a transport layer protocol used in the Internet that establishes a connection between the computers and provides reliable data transfer.
In PSS, RTSP is used in the streaming of continuous media to provide session set-up and to control the individual media streams. RTSP is a text-based protocol. RTSP is intentionally similar in syntax and operation to HTTP/1.1 so that extension mechanisms to HTTP can in most cases also be added to RTSP. An RTSP session typically consists of a client computer defining a transport mechanism for the continuous media stream and then starting the stream. The stream may be paused temporarily. RTSP controls the stream, that may be sent via a separate protocol, independent of the control channel. For example, RTSP control may occur on a TCP connection while the streaming data flows using UDP.
RTP enables the controlled delivery of real-time data, such as audio, video, or simulation data. Sources of the data can include both live and on-demand content. RTP provides end-to-end network transport functions for applications transmitting real-time data over multicast or unicast network services. RTP supports content identification, sequence numbering, timing reconstruction, and delivery monitoring to the real-time applications. RTSP is designed to work with established protocols such as RTP and HTTP.
Both on-demand and live streaming media data can be accessed by a client computer using the Internet and streaming protocols. On-demand streaming media data may be associated with a variety of different events including, but not limited to, sporting events, concerts, news events, etc. After the event completion, the event may be divided into a set of specific sub-events that together describe and summarize the key characteristics of the event. The types of characterizing sub-events may depend on the type of event. For example, a baseball box score has been used by baseball fans since the early 1800's to summarize a baseball game using a set of data associated with each player and each pitcher. However, while an individual may not have the time necessary to view and/or to listen to a recording of the entire event, reviewing a set of numbers that summarize a sporting event or brief text that describes a news event does not allow the individual to sufficiently experience the event. What is needed, therefore, is a system that permits an individual to experience the characterizing sub-events associated with the event instead of looking at, for example, numbers or summary text or being required to view a recording of the entire event. What is further needed is a system that automatically links the characterizing sub-events with a recording of the entire event to reduce the time and the cost associated with implementing the system.